Page:Facsimile of the original outlines before colouring of The songs of innocence and of experience executed by William Blake.djvu/12

 exact account of every word. The Introduction says that the Songs are addressed to children. To look deeply into them would be anything but a proof of profundity in the critic. They were intended to be enjoyed simply, so let us simply enjoy them.

This is the mood in which they have been received for half a century and more. An attempt to show what these Songs really contain arouses something akin to resentment. If there be, unfortunately, any symbolic purpose in them, such as destroyed all the later writings of the same author and made him pass for a madman in the end, then the less we hear of this melancholy blemish, and the sooner we are allowed to forget it, the better.

Those whose feelings are expressed in some such words as these always utter their view with an emphasis and a determination which shows that any attempt to differ from them would produce only anger, and would lead to no change in the attitude of their minds. And yet they are people with whom it is impossible not to sympathize. Their error and their anger spring from a true love of poetry, a love that is jealous of the entrance of symbolism into verse, as though this were an intrusion. The tricks of the writers of acrostics appear only less hateful to them. Symbolism, as they know, often springs from a systematic use of metaphor, persisted in until figures of speech become technical terms, so that what was once a beautiful image and a vivid illustration descends into a slavery of repetition and becomes—or would become but for its beauty—little better than an addition to that degraded language of the illiterate classes called slang. Symbolism is, indeed, all this, and more. But it is not necessarily prosaic. Eastern writers, as every reader of the Bible knows, are most poetic when most symbolic. Western minds grasp readily at Eastern symbols and, as the Puritans have proved too well, can almost force us to believe that, on modern lips, prose and symbolism are invariably found together. But for Edmund Spenser, Blake would be the only great modern Western symbolic poet. As it is, his richness of invention and significance of myth place him so far above and beyond Spenser that his writings practically begin and end the literature in which they must be classed.

No general account, however slight, can be given of Blake's symbolism here. It is exceedingly unlikely that anyone will possess a copy of the present reproductions of the Songs who has not made some acquaintance with the interpretation of the entire symbolic system prepared by the present writer in collaboration with Mr. Yeats, and printed in the first two volumes of the only complete edition of Blake's works,—that issued by the publisher of this facsimile. In those pages, the chapter on the Songs was very brief. Its substance will be found repeated here, with several additions. Like all the